Facts of the Case
Munson P. Hunter, III pleaded guilty to committing wire fraud affecting a financial institution and to aiding and abetting. A federal district court sentenced him to 51 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release. A specific condition of that supervised release requires Hunter to take any mental health medication prescribed by his physician.
Hunter challenged his sentence at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, arguing the medication condition infringed on his due process liberty interests and that the written judgment improperly included the “aiding and abetting” reference. The Fifth Circuit dismissed the appeal regarding the medication condition, finding it was barred by an appeal waiver in Hunter's plea agreement, and affirmed the judgment, noting that the “aiding and abetting” charge was indeed part of the count to which Hunter pleaded guilty.
Questions
1. Does an appeal waiver bar all claims except for ineffective assistance of counsel or a sentence exceeding the statutory maximum?
2. Does such a waiver become ineffective if the sentencing judge later tells the defendant they can appeal, and the government fails to object?
Conclusions
-
When a criminal defendant signs an appeal waiver as part of a plea agreement — a promise not to challenge a future sentence — that waiver becomes unenforceable if enforcing it would produce a miscarriage of justice, meaning it would lock in place an egregious sentencing error so obvious and extreme that it would bring the judicial system into disrepute. Justice Elena Kagan authored the 8-1 majority opinion.
A district court must affirmatively accept a plea agreement before it takes effect, and an appeals court holds exclusive control over whether to enforce the waiver — meaning a court's decision to enforce a waiver directly cements a sentence in place, lawful or not. Because courts sit at the center of approving and implementing these agreements from start to finish, they carry an institutional responsibility for the results. Federal courts have a recognized independent interest in ensuring that legal proceedings appear fair; automatically enforcing appeal waivers without exception would risk allowing obviously lawless sentences to stand, which would damage public confidence in the judiciary. That institutional responsibility means the parties' agreement alone cannot be the final word.
The miscarriage-of-justice standard sets a deliberately high bar: ordinary sentencing errors — mistakes in calculating a guidelines range or weighing sentencing factors — cannot overcome a valid waiver, because routine errors do not discredit the courts and because a looser standard would undermine the value of appeal waivers in plea negotiations. Only obvious, egregious errors qualify. Non-exhaustive examples include a sentence that exceeds what the relevant statute permits, a sentence infected with a blatant constitutional violation such as a judge using race as a factor or imposing a constitutionally invalid supervised release condition, and a sentence imposed without any minimum of civilized procedure. Because the Fifth Circuit never applied this standard to Hunter's challenge to the mandatory-medication condition, the case returns to that court to resolve whether his appeal waiver should be set aside.
- Justice Neil Gorsuch concurred (joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Jackson), arguing that today's ruling is an important but incomplete correction to the Court's long history of enabling coercive plea bargaining, and suggesting that lower courts should apply the miscarriage-of-justice exception broadly to include plain guidelines errors, substantively unreasonable sentences, and conditions of supervised release wholly unrelated to legitimate sentencing purposes, while also questioning whether appeal waivers may be fundamentally problematic as prospective waivers of statutory rights.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred (joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett), writing separately to emphasize that the majority establishes a genuinely high bar limited to extreme and egregious cases, and to flag his disagreement with Justice Gorsuch's concurrence as potentially setting a lower threshold than the majority intends.
Justice Barrett concurred, writing to clarify that the decision rests on longstanding procedural common law principles governing waiver rather than on the Court's supervisory power over inferior federal courts, a power she views skeptically.
Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, arguing that Hunter's knowing and voluntary appeal waiver is a valid, bargained-for relinquishment of a statutory right and must be enforced, that the majority identifies no constitutional text, statute, or established common-law doctrine to support its new miscarriage-of-justice exception, and that the decision amounts to unlawful policymaking that will flood courts with meritless appeals and erode the value of plea agreements for defendants.
Criminal Law & Procedure at the Supreme Court—A Recap of OT25
This term, several important questions of criminal law and procedure reached the Supreme Court, ranging...
